9-21-2005
Before I begin my blog critique, I'd like to make a few observations about our campus. In the paeolithic age when I was an undergraduate (at an all-male school), we lived in comfortable squalor; longish ,unwashed hair (we showered, on occasion, if we thought a female might wander in), unshaved or with a two-day growth, wrinkled shirt, any-old pants. When I went to law school in San Francisco, it was flower-power time, even longer hair and general scruffiness, which somehow equated with radical life-style, Timothy Leary, and intellectuality. Clean and neat meant straight and gererally non-thinking.
But now I look around me and I'm in Stepford! Everybody looks neat and trim, emphatically preppy. Ogling co-eds who don't seem to sweat, ever, even coming off a ball field, is immensely unsatisfying. I guess I'm more a Henry Miller lecher than a Scott Fitzgerald, I like a little raunch in my life -both scholastic and sexual. I feel like walking around messing up everybody's hair.
Enough of this, but it does segue into one last thought I had about "dooce". Heather B.>Armstrong is clearly influenced by her super-straight Mormon environment. She wants to kick over the traces and be outrageous, but she does it in a way that is somehow well within the bounds of social convention, coming off "bitchy" but not a bitch. By the way, Salt Lake City is 76% Mormon and Utah as a whole tops 70%(a s c. Stengel says,"you could look it up"). You can't live there and not re-act in some way to that fact. I believe there are a multitude of young women in the American middle class, with values to match, who suffer from "Thelma and Louise" syndrome and identify readily with Ms. Armstrong, rebelling mentally but leading quiet, conforming lives. Desperate housewives- in Utah, maybe, propelling this blogspot close to the top of the popularity chart.
Finally to Jason Kottle. By his own description, his blog is about "everything and nothing", a Seinfeld of a blog. I really enjoyed his taste in choosing the quirky little items. I also liked his style of presenting common sense thinking resulting in somewhat bizarre, or at least alternative-style, solutions to common problems. In doing so, he definitely assumes the intelligence of his readers, which is a relief to some of us who are fed up with being bludgeoned with the obvious. As an example, the article from the New Yorker suggesting driving up the cost of gas(and gas taxes) to eventually curtail the American public's ridiculous overconsumption of fossil fuels is on it's face outrageous, but with a little thought there may be a kernel of common sense in the idea. J. Kottle is all about sense, common or other wise, and I spent some very enjoyable time reading his blog-especially the section on the AIGA conference.
Enough. Later.